


Sartorial Sense

by almeaculpa



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jim being Jim, M/M, Mind palaces, Sapiosexuality, Sartorial, Sheriarty - Freeform, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sherlock Is A Bit Not Good
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-12 10:14:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2105889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almeaculpa/pseuds/almeaculpa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A summary is a difficult thing. Maybe you should just come and play?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Milk, no sugar.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm open to being beta'd and Britpicked. In all honesty, I'd love it. I'd roll around on it like a naked Jim frotting himself against Sherlock's coat in the sitting room at 221B while Sherlock and John slept. It would _delight_ me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My original comment above inspired me. http://archiveofourown.org/works/2106528

"Most people knock. But then, you're not most people I suppose." Sherlock lowers the violin, smells pomade. "Kettle's just boiled."

"Johanne Sebastian would be appalled." Moriarty is moving into the flat as he speaks, picking up an apple from the coffee table, "May I?" 

Sherlock turns, all courtesy and gallantry, gestures, says "Please." Sees Moriarty. Sees Jim.

Jim's just come from the trial. Jim's been in custody for five days. Now, someone sent him his suits. He was arrested in a disguise, someone sent him his real skin - the Westwoods, the crisp club-collar shirts, the ties, all the colors of melted vanilla ice cream. The tie pin (A wolf's head? No, it's a fox, of course a fox.) and Sherlock expected French cuffs, expected the glint of pewter again, and expected the subtle bluing of pewter set with lead, set with toxin, would be shocked to find anything in Jim set with antimony, thinks about bismuth, thinks 83Bi would be clever, fitting, knows precisely what he would find if he settled that (crazy like a) fox-head tie pin in a crucible. And he thinks this is a crucible, different elements interacting, showing their natures.

Jim ignores him, his gallant offer of John's armchair. He crosses to Sherlock's Le Corbusier and seats himself.

Jim's just come from the trial. Jim's been in custody for five days. Jim's carrying a knife. No, not a knife. Jim's carrying a multitool (Leatherman, not quite as useful as Sherlocks but Jim uses his for more than pinning down the post) and the sight of it fills Sherlock with rage. Because Jim didn't come straight to him. Between "not guilty" and "most people knock" somewhere the man gave some part of that mad focus to someone else. It's all over him, it's in the line of that suit, in the wallet in his back pocket because he hadn't had a wallet when they took him in. He hadn't had a wallet, he hadn't had a knife. Sherlock knows what Jim had had. When that ordinary police man bundled Jim into the back of that ordinary police car Jim had had:

A white cotton t shirt, Gucci.  
A pair of Imogene+Willies  
Black Faulks  
Profeet trainers

(He'd robbed the Tower of London _without pants on._ )

Before they'd laid ordinary hands on him, he'd had a smartphone from which every byte of data but Sherlock's number and La Gazza Ladra had vanished, a pair of cheap earbuds and the Crown Jewels. Before that there had been the disguise, plain sight of a tourist trap cap and a cheap coat, a wad of chewing gum, a diamond that could be traced back to a robbery in Dubai & a small aerosol delivery cylinder loaded with an as-yet unidentified rapid delivery sedative. And Sherlock thinks that a little sartorial sense on the part of the Tower guard then would have told them that they were looking at something special. (Sherlock does not think about the hands on Jim, does not think of the cobbler's thumb on Jim's instep, doesn't think that someone knelt in front of Jim and laid a measure along his inseam, doesn't think of the sway of Jim's hips moving a button fly against him as he closed his eyes in the moment before impact.)

No wallet, no multitool. Someone came for him, brought him these things, spoke to him before he came to 221B. He stepped out of the court through the rear exit, left the building with nothing but the clothes on his back. Sherlock'd bribed the desk agent in holding, when Moriarty's things had been delivered by courier Sherlock had known the trial would end in five days. There were five garment bags with five suits, five shirts, five ties, neatly pressed and hung. One unmarked cardboard box containing a comb, a tin of pomade and one of skin cream (both unlabeled, both deciphered) a tie pin, five more pairs of absurdly posh socks, two bespoke pairs of John Lobbs and four Hermès pants in bright tones. (He'd needed pictures, he had not made a game of guessing which color Jim had chosen each day of the proceedings.) 

Sherlock takes his rage and folds it neatly, settles it away in a pigeonhole in his great grand aunt's writing desk in the room inside him that is his mother's office, tucks it between the half audited list of every cologne that he's been checking the scent of that cheap jacket against. He buried his nose in it the minute he was alone with the evidence, data mining. Knows the skin cream, the pomade, still checking colognes, can't discount the chance that it's a custom job, appends a list of parfumeurs to the list of colognes, returns to the sitting room between one heartbeat and the next.

He turns to pour, thinking that for a man who professes not to enjoy getting his hands dirty there are a remarkable number of scars on Jim's knuckles (his left digitus medius once broken at the second phalange and badly set, scars in all five nail beds, severe scarring on the right palm indicating a defensive wound that may well have caused damage to the median nerve, placement of callus indicative of habitual use of a fountain pen), he has a pugilist's hands, a bomb maker's hands, a poet's hands. 

"You know when he was on his deathbed, Bach, he heard his son at the piano playing one of his - " Jim pauses, watching Sherlock pour, watching Sherlock's own hands and how they are steady and faultless (while screaming their own stories into the ether) even as his hands work autonomously, carving and turning the apple, " - pieces. The boy stopped before he got to the end - "

Here Sherlock throws himself in, "And the dying man jumped out of his bed, ran straight to the piano and finished it." He puts the kettle down.

"Couldn't cope with an unfinished melody." Jim sounds amused, licks his lips, and Sherlock sees those four bright blooms of improbable colour in an unmarked cardboard box. Sees Moriarty taking the memory stick from him in a dark pool and carefully not touching, sees him press the place where Sherlock's fingers had been to his lips, sees him lick those lips then too.

"Neither can you, it's why you've come." Sherlock pours the milk, no sugar. He does not need to ask how Jim takes his tea - he's been receiving reports from the bailiffs who bring Jim his midday meal for five days (four colours, verdigris, cinnabar, orpiment, ultramarine) - not that Jim has touched his lunch. According to them the only nourishment he'd taken in the court was tea with milk and whatever little sugar he extracted from chewing gum. It hadn't, until this moment, occurred to Sherlock to enquire about the fare at the detention center, to ask if Jim had been eating at all, he hadn't considered the man as a calorie burning entity until Jim had picked up the apple.

"But be honest, you're just a tiny bit pleased." It's being Irish that tilts the end of that sentence, it's not a question (is it a question?) because he (thinks) he already knows the answer. Sherlock feels dowdy, his flat looks dull and pedestrian in the mid morning light, how has he never noticed before?

"What, with the verdict?" Sherlock moves to hand over the cup and saucer, the veneer of civility, and Jim uncrosses his legs, leans forward. They are as close now as they have ever been. The cologne is subtle, loamy and spiced (Sherlock is six and Mycroft is looking for him, he is lying beneath a rhododendron at the edge of a copse of trees behind the estates, his cheek pressed tightly to a low ground cover of thyme where it creeps into the shadow and is watered by a slow trickle of shame from his right eye, involuntary and hateful). Sherlock can eliminate twenty more scents from the potential candidates.

"With me," Jim says, "back on the streets." His voice is intimate, low. He is seeing the flare of Sherlock's nostrils and he is reading Sherlock's pulse because he has not reached out for his tea, though the cup has rattled gently in the saucer, he has taken Sherlock's hand in his own and curled his fingers gently around Sherlock's wrist. They have never touched before this moment, an echo, and Jim's skin is fever hot, he has a knife in his other hand. "Every fairy tale needs a good old fashioned villain." He says and he smiles, releases Sherlock's hand to take his tea. (He smiles often, fine lines around his eyes where he has worn his skin into the patterns of comfortable use.)

Sherlock turns away, feeling acutely that in his rush to select a jacket he has somehow been left naked, unarmed despite the polite trappings of tea which ought to make an Englishman secure. "You need me," Jim swallows a bit of apple, trapped all this time between cheek and gum perfuming his words with amyl pentanoate, "or you're nothing." Jim turns his cup in the saucer, watches Sherlock pour his own milk as he says, "Because we're just alike, you and I." Lifts his saucer. "Except you're boring." Shakes his head, drops and octave, "You're on the side of the angels." Touches the cup to his lips but does not drink. 

Two paths appear. Sherlock can lift his saucer, they can discuss the jury-rigging as he stirs his tea and seats himself - ignoring this assumption that has filled the air between them from the moment _Jim from IT_ took in his posture, his tone. Moriarty can bluster and brag, drive Sherlock through the conversation like The Woman drives her customers across the floor with her crop and play his game through to whatever end he's planned out - whatever fire he intends Sherlock to burn in. (An angel, burnt, is a demon. Fire refines to purest form, burns away dross. Two elements, heated in a crucible, will show their properties by their interaction - but the results will not be empirically valid if one substance is contaminated.)

Or the game can stop here. 

Sherlock puts down his saucer, settles the spoon beside the cup, feels Jim become still behind him - watchful. He does not turn when he says, "I may be on the side of the angels but don't, _for one second_ , think I am one."


	2. The Empty Room

Sherlock straightens, tugs his jacket into place. Jim is thinking about his tea, thinking that the smell of degrading lipase could cover a great many sins and that angel sins maybe smelled like Lifeboat too, that of course it would be robust, that maybe it's deliberately Irish - overtly so. Or that maybe this is the standard fare here - a nice stiff cup of the Irish. Jim grins a grin he knows shows too many of his teeth but is more genuine than one of his pleasant public-consumption smiles, more teeth and more truth.

He doesn't have Sherlock's nose for chemical composition, at least not the organic, though he's quite certain that Sherlock couldn't sniff out an RTN imbalance in plastique so perhaps it's simply another venue where their skills are complimentary. (Jim remembers the look on the face of his project director at the Lincoln Lab, disbelief melting into pleasure as the spectrograph proved him right, "Christ James, that's amazing." The man is frozen there in portraiture, hung carefully on the wall where there had been an eyewash station Jim had found aesthetically offensive.) 

\---

When he had left the courtroom earlier a black Mazda had been idling at the kerb, tinted glass and stolen plates. He'd slipped into it without a second look, crossed his legs at the ankle and closed his eyes for a long moment, wishing Sherlock had been there, had see him win - victory was sweeter with those eyes on him. It wasn't until his eyes opened again that the driver spoke, "Brought you some things, sir."

"Give them here then." A plain white bag with twine handles held a new wallet of creamy leather, thick with large bills, two charge cards and a license all in the name Jacob Micheli (an address in Havering). "Take St. John's to Park." A new Leatherman multitool, a mobile phone. He slips the multitool into his breast pocket, shifts to seat the wallet. The car has not moved. "Drive, Moran."

Years of service earned Moran the infinitesimal pause between the command and the smooth purr of acceleration - Jim had to move then or the press would have been on him, a waste of time that would have left him drinking cold tea. When he stepped onto the kerb in front of Speedy's (good gyros, bad coffee) he left the mobile on the seat of the car.

\---

Jim inhales though his nose once more and doesn't think Sherlock will poison him. He takes a slow sip of tea, watching the line of Sherlock's shoulders. Sherlock is angry with him, when he turns his lips will be bloodless and his eyes will be on fire and everything will go exactly as Jim has predicted, for all that this insistence is an unexpected variable Jim knows the equation well enough to solve for the zero sum. He surprises himself (a turn that never fails to annoy and delight, changeable indeed) by moving to acquiesce, "Why honey, I never said you were one of them."

Sherlock does not move, does not react in any way, a reaction in itself. Still angry though, poor thing. Jim settles his saucer on the arm of Sherlock's chair and lifts the apple, gouges with the tip of the multitool, works out another little whorl of fruit flesh and lifts it to his lips on the blade. The shadow of a plane passes overhead and in the change of light each mote of dust is highlighted in Brownian frenzy, a greater agitation over Sherlock's shoulders where the heat of his body disturbs them, strange for a man whose hands and wrists are so cold (a symptom of shock). Well - Jim _is shocking._

Sherlock's suit coat was tailored for him eight months ago. He'd put on just a little more muscle with John around and he's lost a bit of that in the past month or so, not been harangued into as many regular meals while he's been working Jim's riddles so furiously - up at all hours, slinking around London at half past three when John's sure he's sleeping. Jim hasn't managed to keep a camera up in the sitting room for more than two days without Sherlock pulling it (but he has one in the kitchen that's been there for a week now and he's eager to watch the footage - has Sherlock been eating at all while Jim's been entertaining the commonwealth?) The blazer isn't fitted as neatly as it ought to be, Sherlock needs to be fed up a bit or have darts put in - or to pick a material with cleaner lines. But Jim does love the subtlety of Sherlock in velvet. It's like so many of the small things in the flat, seen up close it's an unspoken bacchanalia of indulgence from a sensualist pretending to be a Spartan.

Sherlock's taste for luxury is well hidden in quality and colour, it's likely John has no idea Sherlock's sheets ship in from Frette and cost more than some Japanese cars. Jim prefers Sferra, the stitching is more regular. The last time he'd stopped a parcel bound to Sherlock he'd found a flaw in one of the pillow cases and had to settle for rubbing his cheek on just the perfect one, fresh from a shower, he knows how much data Sherlock gets from scents - he knows that's why Sherlock first began smoking (because it's why he first began as well). It was an adolescent response to sensory overload that had chemical and neurological benefits he'd learned to exploit (not an addict, I'll quit when I like). He just bets Sherlock's got one of those ludicrous patches on now, he wouldn't mind a piece of minty-fresh peace of mind himself but he's keeping that bit back, knows that Sherlock doesn't know (doesn't picture Sherlock inhaling).

Sherlock still hasn't moved, hasn't spoken - Jim savors the sugar of the apple, swallows the morsel unchewed, the working of his epiglottis sounding obscenely intimate in the stillness of the flat. 

Can he explain to Sherlock that people are, for the most part, two and threes? Sherlock rates things, he knows Sherlock rates. Lovely, lithe, lazy Sherlock, wrapped in his sheet and not stirring himself for anything "less than a seven" - Jim will move for a five but Jim doesn't have a blogger and Jim may be getting just a wee bit desperate. Of course, Jim isn't solving mysteries with some motley Scooby gang, he just wants to see something that isn't so painfully fucking ordinary. And ordinary people are twos and threes, the occasional four. Those are the angels, the fours and the sometimes fives who are still colouring in the lines. Doofuses and morons are threes and down - every six and seven Jim has ever met have been thinking outside the box of the legal system and the eights are outside the cube of morality altogether and tolerable in the short term. He knows one person who is sometimes a nine but he's a four with his pressure point pushed and fours are _so boring_. Sherlock is the only ten he's ever known, the only other **real** person in the world. Before Sherlock Jim was a man alone in a room of cardboard cutouts in varying ridiculous poses and now it's like he can finally hear another heartbeat and it makes his heart sing and sing and _shout_ because they are made for each other, purpose built to fill one another's negative spaces, to make the entire world real. (And it makes some part of him angry, the part he keeps fed with terrible things hates Sherlock, hates the reality of the other man, wants to crush him, to prove that no one is Jim, no one is real, everything is lies and lies and _lies_ and people dying like they do and that part would grind Sherlock flat and squeeze out the juice of him and roll in it with its mouth open laughing. 

Jim puts the rage away, rolls it tight in a map of dead stars and puts it in the endless dark cellar behind the red painted door in the room in his head that was where his mother had slept, North of the Liffey and South of perdition.) 

He swallows again, knowing that his salivary response is one part tea and two parts honesty, excited by the thought of exposing even a tiny piece of his thoughts. "Angels don't occur past a six." 

Sherlock still does not move, all of his attention is on Jim but his eyes are on a wedge of the bathroom door visible in the hallway when he speaks, "You mean you'll go this far out of your way for anything less than a seven?" He may not be smiling, but he is no longer angry (and he _understands!_ sings out a man who is no longer in an empty room). 

"Did I say that?" Jim pushes his voice to be a caricature of offended sensibility, hides his jubilation. He can play the muscles in his throat like an organist, (such a useful skill and something Sherlock could learn from him, the two of them standing in front of a mirror, Jim behind Sherlock with only his eyes visible over one of the taller mans shoulders, Jim's hand on Sherlock's throat pushing until things inside shift into new patterns). 

"For a man who so clearly loves the sound of his own voice you say remarkably little." Sherlock is turning as he speaks and Jim makes sure to show him a benign smile this time just to see those eyes move over his mouth and not be fooled. He knows Sherlock has heard the important things. He knows he has been understood and he feels the relief of slipping back into English after speaking Cantonese for months, an ease of pressure unnoticed till it's gone from somewhere around the brain stem and something people can usually only give him once when he watches the light go out of their eyes. Each time Jim realizes that Sherlock can, and has, given him that intimacy more than once it is a _revelation_ to him. 

Sherlock's eyes are moving over Jim's face, an audience for a one man show he's been playing to an empty house for his entire life. It makes him want to show off (to scream, to weep, to put on the best goddamned performance of his life), and he surprises himself when he speaks honestly again, "You make me happy." The words ring in the empty flat and his own suddenly burning ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just for you, Stranger. Needs work, but Jim would be harder to read than Sherlock, wouldn't he?


End file.
